Next time, please embed your code in CODE tags, that will enlighten your post considerably ;-). Read the Site how to while you're at it.

You already seem to have a firm grasp of regexs. You can read a bit more in perlre, Death to Dot Star! and 7 Stages of Regex Users. Look also at the links in regex tutorial, and of course at YAPE-Regex-Explain-1.01 released!. What you want, is simply an insertion of \s* around the '=' to allow any amount of whitespace to be read in.

 ...
 $line =~ /^([^=]+)\s*=\s*(.*)/;
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Furthermore, I would add a chomp $line; at the beginning of your while loop to remove newlines from your hash. Other issues: You don't check for the occurrence of a comment-line; If you only can have one '=', you'd better stick with split. That all results in:

while( <> ){
  next if /^#/;                            #check for comment
  next unless /=/;                         #check if = present
  chomp;                                   #remove newline
  split /\s*=\s*/, $_, 2;                  #split line to @_
  $values{ $_[0] } = $_[1];                #assign to hash
}
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I used $_, it gets automagically assinged to by the while. Removes a bit of the code's complexity.

Cheers,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)